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 very slowly, and he was long delayed at Berwick. Arrived in Edinburgh in August, he gave James much good counsel, and warned him against the Earl of Arran, whose influence was, as he suspected, supreme at the Scottish court. After a month's stay Walsingham set out on the homeward journey, with all his prognostications of the inutility of his embassy confirmed. By way of avenging himself on him for his interposition, Arran substituted ‘a stone of crystal’ for the rich diamond in the ring which James assigned to the English envoy on his departure (State Papers, Scotl., ed. Thorpe, i. 452–9; Cal. Hatfield MSS. iii. 124–7;, Memoirs, 1683, pp. 147–8; , The Great Lord Burghley, pp. 381–2).

Walsingham's purpose was unchanged. The queen must still be driven at all costs into effective intervention in behalf of the protestants in the Low Countries. The chances of the queen's surrender on the point seemed small. In 1584 Walsingham wrote to Davison, the English envoy in the Netherlands: ‘Sorry I am to see the course that is taken in this weighty cause, for we will neither help these poor countries ourselves nor yet suffer others to do it.’ At length, in 1585, mainly owing to his untiring pressure, he had the satisfaction of negotiating with the Dutch commissioner in London the terms on which the queen was willing to make war on Spain in behalf of the revolted protestants in his Flemish dominions. But even then the queen's parsimony and caprice prevented any blow being struck with fitting force. ‘He is utterly discouraged,’ wrote Leicester of Walsingham when setting out to take command of the protestant army in Holland. Dissensions in the council grew rapidly after the offensive alliance with the States-General had been carried into effect. Burghley, Hatton, and others of her intimate friends encouraged the queen in her vacillation. Walsingham urged her to pursue warlike operations with sustained vigour, but he was hampered by his being kept, at the queen's suggestion, in ignorance of much of the correspondence that was passing between her and English envoys in the Low Countries. Walsingham boldly warned her of the danger and dishonour of her undignified proceedings. The queen equivocated when thus openly challenged. Walsingham had means at his command to track out the disingenuous negotiations which the queen and her friends vainly hoped to keep from his knowledge. But the practical direction of the campaign lay outside his sphere, and none of the decisive results he anticipated came from the active support that Elizabeth temporarily extended to her coreligionists in the Low Countries in their prolonged struggle with Spain.

Walsingham soon determined that Elizabeth should strike a more decisive blow at home against the designs of Spain and the machinations of the catholics. The reports of his spies convinced him that the safety of the country was endangered by the presence of Mary Queen of Scots and by the catholic intrigue of which she was the centre. He frequently protested that his attitude of hostility to catholics was a purely political necessity. Assassination of the queen and her advisers was the weapon which they designed to use in order to restore England to the old faith. Consequently catholic conspirators were to be dealt with as ordinary criminals and murderers in posse. This conviction was brought home to him in 1584 by his investigation of the aims and practices of William Parry (d. 1585) [q. v.] Walsingham long watched, through his spies, Parry's movements. Naunton remarks, ‘It is inconceivable why he suffered Dr. Parry to play so long on the hook before he hoysed him up;’ but Walsingham was very cautiously surveying the whole field of catholic conspiracy. He was in the special commission of oyer and terminer for Middlesex, issued 20 Feb. 1584–5, under which Parry was convicted of high treason. Next year he unravelled a more dangerous plot. The detection of the conspiracy of Anthony Babington, John Ballard, and their accomplices was wholly owing to his sagacity. Gilbert Gifford [q. v.], the chief agent in the discovery, was not an agent of high character, but there is no legitimate room for doubt that the young catholics against whom Gifford informed were guilty of the designs against the life of Queen Elizabeth for which Walsingham caused them to be arrested and tried. He was a member of the special commission for Middlesex issued 5 Sept. 1586 by which they were convicted.

It was the unravelling of the Babington conspiracy that involved Mary Queen of Scots in a definite crime of treason—of abetting the murder of Elizabeth. The intercepted letters that had passed between her and Babington bore no other interpretation. It has been urged by Queen Mary's advocates that Walsingham's agents interpolated in Mary's letter of 17 July 1586 a postscript begging Babington to send her immediate intelligence of the successful assassination of Elizabeth. The history of the passage is obscure, and there seems ground for doubting whether it figured in Mary's first draft. But the rest of Mary's letter, which is of